2010/06/29

It has come to our attention that a problem exists with some of the nVidia CUDA systems running on the Windows operating system. The CUDA system already released is up to version 3.1, while our dnetc application only supports up to CUDA 2.2.

If your graphics driver is designed for a higher version than this, the application will appear to run normally, but will send us junk results. One way to test if you are running a compatible version is to run ‘dnetc -test’. A working system should pass all of the tests.

When dnetc for CUDA systems loads, it shows a line that begins:- ‘nvcuda.dll Version:’. If the version displayed is 8.17.11.9775, your card will produce junk data (which our stats system will filter).

We hope to release a new version of the dnetc application that will support the CUDA 3.1 drivers soon.

2010/05/09

Greetings everyone. I’d like to take the opportunity to introduce myself. My real name is Korey, and I’m one of distributed.net’s newer staffers. I’m going to be doing a lot of what I’m doing now – communicating with you, our users. Our new blogging system makes it quick and easy for the d.net crew to fire off updates about our projects. So expect more from me.

One thing I’d like to share with you now is some exciting news about out RC5-72 project. If you haven’t taken a good look at that project in a while, have a glance at it now. I’m sure you will notice something very different as of late – higher keyrates. What do we have to thank for that? In a nutshell, GPU based clients. That’s right, the ability to run the distributed.net client on video cards. Currently, several NVIDIA based and ATI/AMD based cards are supported. Client’s for use on video cards are available on our pre-release page.
As always, pre-release clients could have a bug or two, so if you find something, be sure to report it using Bugzilla.

So just how fast are these GPU based clients? FAST. For example, an ATI HD 5870 video card is able to crunch over 1.8 billion keys/second. Yes, I said billion. With a B. A high end CPU, say an Intel core i7, would be lucky to get 80 million keys/sec. And that’s on the high side of an estimate.

So, if you’re willing, head on over to our pre-release page, and download one of the GPU based clients.
Your continued support of distributed.net’s efforts is always appreciated; keep crunching!
-koremore

2009/09/29

We’d like to let our ATI Stream users know that we’ve posted anupdated Stream client beta for Windows. A Linux beta will followshortly. As with all our pre-release software, clients can be found athttp://www.distributed.net/download/prerelease.php. This version of the clientfixes compatibility issues with Catalyst drivers 9.9. However, there are stillseveral known issues with this beta. Known issues include:

The Stream client will not be used to its full potential unless its priority is set =2 or higher. To achieve this, enter the client’s configuration mode, and go to options 3,3 and change the value to “2”.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) lag is still heavy. While this isn’t an issue with dedicated crunching systems, if you run the Stream client on your primary computer, the lag may bother you. As a workaround, use the screen saver mode to overcome this. A link to directions to enable the screen saver can be found at the end of this .plan.

Sometimes, upon exiting, the client will not save the work unit currently being crunched. This is cumbersome if you have been working on a large work unit, say 64*2^32, as all work will have to be re-processed. As a workaround here, you can enable the “checkpointing” feature. To do this, enter the client’s configuration mode, and go to options 2,4 and choose a path and file name for your checkpoint file.

There are on-going issues related to remote desktop connections to Stream clients. It has been reported that using third party remote connection software (VNC) overcomes these issues.

We are working on ironing out the remaining bugs in the Stream client. If youhave software development experience, a compatible ATI Stream video card,and think you may be able to help with these bugs, please send an E-mail tohelp@distributed.net.

We want to thank all of our early adopters for their help testing ourbeta clients. Currently, the Stream client produces the fastest key ratesof any desktop hardware component. It is truly an exciting time here atdistributed.net!

2009/08/14

We have been testing distributed.net clients for nVidia CUDA-compatible cardsfor a while. Several users have noted that they are quicker than standard CPUclients at processing RC5 packets. Yesterday, CUDA cards contributed about 3%of the total work processed for the RC5 project. This may appear small, butover time, it is significant.

At about the same time as nVidia launched the CUDA system, AMD came out with acompetitor which it calls Stream. Thanks to some excellent work by our friendSla Chupyatov, we now have a client ready for testing on Stream systems.

If you run Windows 32-bit or Linux and have an AMD R600 or highergraphics system (HD 2xxx or better) with the Catalyst 9.7 drivers (orhigher) installed, you can help us test it. We are interested to hearyour feedback. Clients are available from our pre-release page at:http://www.distributed.net/download/prerelease.php. Please, continue to reportany bugs or issues to our bug database at: http://bugs.distributed.net/.

We would like to thank all of our dedicated early adopters for helping us withtesting.

PS: In order for your pre-release AMD client to achieve optimal key rates,the priority should be set to “2” using the built-in configuration menu (3:Performance related options).

As mentioned in a previous plan, these new x86 clients contain three
new OGR cores. Depending on your CPU type, the new cores may provide a
significant speed improvement over the cores used in previous client
versions.

Additionally we strongly recommend that users of OGR PowerPC clients
version 2.9103 or 2.9104 upgrade to these newer versions. It was
discovered that those two specific version numbers could process
OGR-27 blocks incorrectly, so results from those client versions have
been blocked. Users of PowerPC platforms should upgrade to client
version 2.9105.511 or later.

We have also promoted the following personal proxy binaries from the
pre-release page to the official release page:

We’re very close to being able to finally mark the first three
stubspaces for OGR-27 complete… The first one (OGR-27.1) was just
finished up in the last few hours. There are just a very small number
of stubs that we are waiting to be completed in OGR-27.2 and OGR-27.3.
We’ll make another announcement when those are finally received.

We have discovered our nVidia CUDA clients prior to v2.9105.512 had a
problem that would cause RC5-72 results to skip part of the
block. This issue turned out to be caused by a bug in the CUDA
compiler itself, which was fixed beginning in the CUDA 2.2 SDK. Going
forward we will only be releasing clients for CUDA version 2.2 and
higher.

The fixed behavior unfortunately reveals that new CUDA clients will be
about half the speed of the older buggy CUDA versions. We understand
that the apparent speed decrease will seem disappointing, but it’s
important to note the earlier speeds were not measuring useful
work. Going forward, speed comparisons should only be made with CUDA
2.2 or higher speeds, as these are the “correct” speeds. Also, please
remember the CUDA clients are still much faster than traditional CPU
clients.

If you are still running a CUDA beta client, we encourage you to
update to the current versions available on our pre-release page:
http://www.distributed.net/download/prerelease.php Results returned by
any earlier clients will no longer be accepted by our keymaster. Users
with prior stats credit from affected clients will not be
retroactively removed.

Due to aspects of our network communication protocol, we are not able
to remotely shutdown only the older, buggy, CUDA clients so we will be
implementing a method to send large, dummy blocks to older CUDA
clients instead.

Since all dnetc CUDA versions released so far have only been “beta”
clients with built-in expiration dates, the impact should be
contained. The last round of beta CUDA clients would have expired at
approximately the end of August 2009.

Thanks again to all of our beta testers that have been helping us
validate this exciting new technology.

2009/02/24

We’ve just confirmed receipt of the last OGR-26 stub, thus marking
that project officially complete! We will try to publish who
submitted the most optimal and last stubs, once we confirm that they
don’t mind their identities being revealed.

You should already notice that fresh OGR-27 stubs are already
available on our proxy network. To work on this project, you will
need to be using the v2.9103 client for your architecture. If you run
a personal proxy, you should upgrade to build 347. As usual, you can
find them http://www.distributed.net/download/

If your platform doesn’t appear to have released clients available
yet, that may be because some are still on the pre-release page–we
hope to officially release them in the next couple of days. We
appreciate your patience.

Due to variations in complexity, we expect that OGR-27 will take us
significantly longer than OGR-26 did. It is difficult to provide a
precise estimate but one extremely rough guess is about 7 years,
assuming no increase in computing power and that our size estimation
sampling reflects the entire stubspace.

There is one thing that is different with OGR-27 than with our
previous OGR projects: we are confident that we will discover a better
ruler for OGR-27 than the one we know to be optimal currently.

This includes the work to improve the CUDA platform, initial work on the AMD
STREAM platform, as well as many different bug fixes and feature improvements.
See the change log in the docs directory for additional details.